Martyrs’ Crossing (27 page)

Yizhar closed his eyes.

“There was no such number,” he heard himself say.

“That's basically what I told him, sir,” Zvili said.

“Anything else?” Yizhar asked. But what else could there be, really?

He heard a sudden shyness overcome his blunt sergeant.

“Oh, actually, yes, sir,” Zvili said. He hesitated, then plunged. “My wife is pregnant.”

“Well, congratulations, Sergeant.
Mazel tov.
” What? Why should Yizhar give a shit? “Best thing in the world.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well, stay on the case, Sergeant. It'll take your mind off the impending event.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're a good man. Don't worry about your buddy. He'll be fine. You're right, I'm on his side. And
I
know what side he's on, even if he doesn't.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, thanks. See you later,
habibi.
” Some soldiers just loved it when you called them
habibi.
It made them feel comfortable, as if you considered them your equal. He'd never call Doron
habibi,
because Doron was proud, and an officer, and would feel and resent the condescension. But Zvili was easy. Kick, kick, touch of the whip applied to this flank, a pull on the reins, a subtle shifting of weight to the right, and there you were: exactly where you wanted to be.

•  •  •

A
LL NIGHT
, Yizhar sat at his desk, his new desk, looking at his cell phone, waiting. He filed a few papers, examined his sad philodendron, didn't water it. He rearranged the supplies with which he had stocked the desk drawers. He listened to the late-night radio news, leafed through a few recent issues of
Jane's Defence
—submarines were his passion—and used the office phone to call Avram Shell at
Ha'aretz
to thank him for the nice placement of the Hajimi photographs. He noticed a spot on the left edge of his desk as they talked. Already decaying like the old one. Shell was planning a series on checkpoints, and Yizhar gave him some information about closure policy, which he'd been studying during the past few days. He told Shell there might be the possibility of an interview in the next few days with the checkpoint soldier, and Shell leaped on it of course; he did a lunchtime interview every day on Army Radio.

As he talked to Shell, Yizhar leaned over to peer at the spot on his new desk. Where the hell had it come from? It was black and ugly.

Shell understood the army and its requirements. He would do a good interview. He knew the right questions to ask—and the right answers. And of course, Yizhar would do a little pre-interview with the commanding officer just to let him know what the conversation was to be about. So the soldier wouldn't waste Shell's tape, because of course the interview would be taped—to avoid any embarrassing mistakes.

During their conversation, Yizhar did not put his feet up on his new desk. No feet on the desk: that was his new policy. He didn't want scuff marks.

After he finished with Shell, he wetted a paper towel in the men's-room sink and then kneeled by the side of his new desk to rub off the spot. While he was down there scrubbing, he noticed a new scratch across the desk's left corner. Damn. His desk was made of good bourgeois decorator wood this time, not hideous bureaucratic socialist metal, but he expected it to start rusting, too, anyway. Story of his life. Every time you get things fixed up, a new glitch appears. The cell phone refused to ring.

The Russian cleaning woman was vacuuming offices and polishing the linoleum in the hallway outside his door. He was used to her silent reproach—conveyed through sullen glares and a stubborn refusal to move her noisy equipment elsewhere when he was on the telephone—which meant: What can you be doing here getting in my way at this hour of the night? Don't you have a family to go home to? To which he could have responded: If you never go home to your family, you end up having no family to go home to. It was a simple equation in which zero equaled zero and he was sure that the cleaning woman would understand—since, if she was like the rest of Israel's Russian cleaning women and cashiers and garbagemen and orderlies and bank tellers, she probably had a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Leningrad University or used to be a tenured physics professor at Moscow U.

Yizhar tried to figure out what would go wrong next. He doubted that Doron would go running to the media—anyway, Doron would certainly hint at it if he were about to, because such a big step would scare him. It
was
possible that Hajimi would discover Doron's name and his whereabouts, and this was more worrisome. Inside prison or out, Hajimi was a tough bird, with connections. From the files Yizhar had read on him, Hajimi emerged as a hard man, narrow, directed, vigilant, adamant, immovable. Not susceptible to pressure. And soon to be released, along with a bunch of other prisoners—Yizhar himself was urging Hajimi's release to cool the flames at the checkpoints. After all, Hajimi was just a Hamas detainee; there was no evidence against him, nothing the Israelis could come up with that showed him to have been involved in any specific incident, probably because he hadn't been, not closely, at any rate. With his son dead, why not release Hajimi now, along with the rest? Offer his release to the Palestinians as a blanket to throw over their street fires. It made sense.

They'd gotten what they could out of the man already. Hajimi had been through it all, Yizhar knew, during his different incarcerations. It was all there in the files. Subjected to
tiltul,
which was shaking: you shook the man so much that it would almost break his neck. His brains would rattle in his skull. It was very frightening and disorienting for the victim, and left no outward marks. Hajimi did not flinch. You put him in the little chair, tied him up for hours and hours on end. Hajimi never broke. Solitary for weeks. Nothing. He gave away nothing. No names, no events, no plans. Imagining such a man on the outside and on Doron's trail—it gave Yizhar a cramp.

On the other hand, if Doron was getting ready to do something stupid, it might not be such a bad idea to have Hajimi out there, after him.

Yizhar knew what he was going to tell Doron to do. It was just a matter of getting in touch with him. The boy was bound to call sooner or later. The problem was it had to be sooner, or who knew what Doron might get up to in the interim, and Yizhar would end up along with all the rest of them, trying to find the soldier. Where
was
the man? What had he been doing between the time he had left Zvili and now? Yizhar jiggled his leg nervously.

He wanted Doron to call him, and not the other way around—it was psychologically preferable—but if Yizhar began to get too worried, Yizhar would be the one doing the calling. He had no doubt that if Hajimi did not yet know the soldier's name, if the Authority did not yet, they all would, and soon. No one on the Palestinian side had mentioned the soldier's phone call, his conversation with his superiors. But they would, they would—if it hadn't actually happened, they would have had to invent it.

Yizhar had narrowed down the possibilities himself. There
were
witnesses. The Hajimi woman, first of all. The lawyer from Ramallah, Mr. Bigmouth. Some of the others who had been waiting. Someone must have heard the name. Zvili, too, was a talker, and you never knew how fast talk could hop from one side of the situation to the other. Yizhar was not looking forward to watching the Chairman on television, asking for the extradition of Lieutenant Ari Doron. Because even if the Authority didn't really want him and wouldn't have the least idea what to do with him, the Israelis would still never hand him over. The Chairman would count on that, and push as hard as he could, in public.

•  •  •

D
ORON SAT IN
front of his mother's house. He didn't want to go up. She might be awake—she kept odd hours. Down the street, he could hear the roosters beginning to squawk in the courtyard of the International Christian Embassy. Could there be roosters there? It seemed to him that roosters always crowed long before dawn broke, in spite of their reputation. It was just a few minutes to four in the morning. He could hear the call to prayer wafting on the end of a night breeze; the distance made it sound off-key. He wondered where it was coming from. Silwan, the Palestinian village that sat on a hillside across from the Old City walls? Or from the Old City itself, from the Muslim quarter? Might be both. Sometimes you thought you were just hearing one call to prayer when actually it was the call going out from loudspeakers installed on dozens of minarets. The muezzin—or the recordings of the muezzin—were like the roosters: all starting at the same time, singing the same song. Back behind his house, where there was a small, one-room synagogue run by an old Moroccan rabbi, the Jews began to sing their morning prayer, too. Without thinking, Doron followed the words: “Listen, Israel . . .”

His poor little country. Beautiful Arab prayers wafting over it from all corners, and it couldn't absorb them, because if you let those prayers filter in, twenty minutes later the whole damned horde would be riding down from the desert to take back everything that had been won so hard. Doron knew how hard, he knew. It wasn't for nothing that he had fought in Lebanon, or watched his father's slow death from the wounds in his leg and shoulder. But was protecting it worth the pain of that poor little boy and his mother? Was it? Was a country worth that loss? Probably it was,
this
country was, anyway. “Civilians die when wars are fought,” his father used to say. “A war is not just about soldiers.” But now, after Ibrahim's death, Doron wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything. He wanted to strike out savagely at Yizhar, and he wanted to tell the Palestinians to shut up with their fucking prayers and daily pilgrimage to the checkpoints, shut up and stay away. Don't risk it, he wanted to say.

His cell phone was sitting in the open glove compartment of his mother's car, which was parked in the sheltered space beneath the house. Next to the phone was his
Yediot
with Yizhar's direct number scrawled in a corner by Zvili. Doron knew Yizhar would be trying to get in touch; he was not the kind of man to tolerate uncertainty for long. Tomorrow was the rally to honor Ibrahim Hajimi and other child martyrs of the Israeli Occupation. It was a relief to know that
his
dead baby was not the only one. That news had really brightened Doron's day. Ten thousand people were supposed to show up for the demonstration, and Doron was going to be among them. The phone rang. He did not pick it up. He wasn't ready yet. He had to pull his nerves together. You couldn't face Yizhar in an emotional mess. You couldn't walk into his office seething and boiling. Doron tried to picture himself wearing his Palestinian costume and sitting in the chair facing Yizhar's desk. A slight smile twisted his lips. But what else would he wear? He never wanted to put his army uniform on again. Never. And he felt uncomfortable in his own clothes. In his own fucking skin.

T
HE GLASSBLOWERS WERE IN TROUBLE,
which meant Mahmoud's brother was in trouble. The day before, in spite of Adnan's brilliant arguments and unquestionable documentation, a judge had handed down a ruling awarding the land the glass factory was on to a family that hadn't lived there since the Prophet defeated the infidel at Badr, if ever. Adnan never understood. He thought that justice was supposed to triumph in this business, but the law was so profoundly corrupt that justice was shunted to the side when it was not completely ignored. Adnan would never believe it, no matter how many times he saw it. Mahmoud had laughed when he heard about the decision, and shook a gently mocking finger in Adnan's face.

A blue glass vase from the factory in question sat in Sheukhi & Sheukhi's fourth-floor window. As schools of clouds moved across the sky, sunlight shot through the vase in bursts, splashing royal blue light over the single metal bookcase, the single file cabinet, and the old television in the corner. Mahmoud stood next to the file cabinet, looking over the judge's decision. Laughable. It smelled of money passing from hand to hand. That was life under the Authority. The blue light flashed over his face. Through the closed window, he heard a siren in the square below. He threw the document onto the desk, went over to the window, and looked down.

A very large crowd for so early, Mahmoud thought. Good. It was only ten in the morning. A group of students with keffiyehs wrapped around their necks stood under snapping green and silver Hamas pennants. Green was the color of Muslim celebration. Snapping and fluttering in unison, the flags looked medieval, like banners waving over a cavalry descending to attack.
TO DIE FOR ALLAH IS OUR HIGHEST GOAL,
Mahmoud read.
LITTLE IBRAHIM DIED FOR ALLAH. HONOR TO HIM.
Mahmoud remained unconvinced. He died for the Palestinian people, Mahmoud corrected. He wondered if his nephew Jibril was down there. Soon he himself would join the crowd. He wanted to see Marina Hajimi again, and hear Raad speak. The legendary Raad no longer seemed so legendary to Mahmoud. What would the man say? What
could
he say? Would he announce the name of the soldier? From Raad's attitude yesterday, Mahmoud doubted it.